A White Macaw

Before Jim came to Nipton, he lived in the hills. He and a friend had come west in 2007. They came looking for the river of gold.

Did you ever find it? What did you eat, what did you drink?

Jim hikes for a day or more by himself in the desert. Once he got to the top of a mountain and found it covered in crystal. An angel puts a hand to her face and begins laughing.The river has become blood.

Brenda came to Nipton when Jim was here already. She came to say goodbye to her brother, Jim’s friend. By that time, the two of them were working as maintenance staff for the little town.

But she didn’t have to say goodbye. This is the last town in California.

Who would have thought to end at the beginning?

Brenda is working now at the Nipton trading post. Her eyes and her hair are like reeds.

There is a young man name Ellis.

Susan and Fernando run the Oasis café. In East LA in the 1970s, Susan’s family received food rations from the government, like all the others. Blocks of yellow cheese, powdered milk.

We instinctively knew not to eat that food, Susan says. We gave it to our neighbors.

What did you eat?

We foraged.

Her son and daughter-in-law have a newborn son they’ve named Quetzalcoatl, a god of the wind.

The best burger in the world is at this café. It is topped with blue cheese, and it is wrapped in a tortilla. It’s like you’ve never seen. This is the world’s end.

In Nipton, there is beginning to become a language not spoken, but felt. Brenda and Jim do it all the time, and not just with one another. They are beginning to do it with everyone. It is like telepathy but it is much more. I’d like to call it a radical empathy. A silence beyond sound.

It began with the crystal. It began with the planets ringing, the creatures in Mercury’s caves. From everything, something came.

Their language begins in the hair. A person embodies, absolutely, that which is inside the person giving.

It happens by way of light.

I’m speaking here of taking on the entire world which is within another person at every moment. It happens by way of breath.

This is why the angel laughs.

This is why a rooster cries and sings.

The Ghost Dance

The dead speak not in the language of signs, but in signs themselves.

*

In room three of the Nipton hotel there is Clara. The hotel is the only hotel in town. The town is the last town in California.

The hotel has five bedrooms and its walls are made of thick adobe, one hundred years old.

On the wall of Clara’s room there is a photograph of Senator William A. Clark, as he appeared at the front of his train car, on the Union Pacific’s inaugural journey from Salt Lake to El Paso. His head is tilted slightly and his jaw struts out. The stiffness of his raised hand is like mercury. Beside him, there are two women and one man. The women and the man are looking down and past the senator, as if the tail had blown off his vest.

Clara loves to look at this photo, loves to look because it so frightens her, the flippancy of the senator’s gaze.

She got up from the bed and smoothed the sheets. She smoothed her white dressing gown and ran her fingers along her own chin and cheekbones. She was still looking at the black and white photograph. She considered the heavy train car and, all around it, the grey sky. The women in the photo are wearing hats with feathers, one with a lace veil over her eyes. Clara looked at the mirror, at ease because she did not see herself there.

Any moment Clara would hear the first sounds of a train approaching. This would signal the arrival of her stagecoach. Charles would help her into her seat.

Tonight the moon is full. Under any other moon they would go towards the town of Searchlight, through the Joshua forest, but tonight they would go the other way, into the Clark Mountains, and onwards to the mine at Mountain Pass.

Now—Clara heard the train’s whistle. She picked up her purse and her hat, turned the brass knob to open her bedroom door.

There were two guests in the hotel, a man and a woman from Switzerland. The woman was sitting on the sofa and the man was sitting at the desk. The man was looking at his camera. The woman read from a soft cover book. They had been at the hotel for three days, in room one, and Clara quite liked them. The man sang songs in the shower and his voice sounded like a clarinet, and the way the man and the woman gave kisses to one another—it pleased her.

Clara walked across the living room and went out the front door. Outside is a wooden porch overlooking a cactus garden, a labyrinth with a round pathway into the center.  

Daedura is growing, the desert moonflower. Clara knows where this is beside the cactuses. At night the great white moth comes to eat from this belladonna.

Clara stepped into the garden. She looked at the moon, so bright up there in its velvet canopy, and the train was coming fast now around the bend.

Clara watched the train’s light pour through the dangling eucalyptus, blaring its horn at the sleepy town. It had arrived.

And so too had Charles. Clara could hear the clip clop of the horses’ hooves, and Charles was waving beside the train. The horses pulled towards the hotel.

Good evening, madam! Charles called out as the carriage slowed.

Good evening, Charles! Clara realized suddenly that she had forgotten her stick inside the hotel, and she would like to have it with her. I’ve forgotten my stick! Charles smiled, and she turned quickly to go back inside. She was gone only an instant and when she appeared again she was holding a smooth white branch, a piece of the eucalyptus. Charles helped Clara into the seat beside him.

Ready? He asked.

Yes ready! Clara said.

To Mountain Pass? Said Charlie.

To Mountain Pass! Echoed Clara.

 And away they went, through the Ivanpah Valley, to the mine at Mountain Pass.

*

The road out of town was quite bumpy, and the wheels of the carriage clanked along, the horses with their heads down.

The desert was alive. Clara could see men running and crouching behind the sagebrush. It was the 10^th of August. Stars were falling.

Carlina, Charles said sweetly (this he sometimes called her, when she seemed particularly far away). Carlina, have you seen the white moth?

Yes, often, she replied, happy to think of the moonflower’s nightly courtship. The moth, and the bats. And yesterday a hummingbird sat with me for an entire afternoon. I was on the porch and the French couple was at the café, and the bird sat on the orange jewel-weed (around the hotel’s wooden pillars), on the stems of it, and it even chased away other birds. His head was red and his chest—green.

Oh! Said Charles.

And there are new pigeons in the loading dock. (This is the building beside the railroad tracks, built by the Molycorp Corporation in 1980. From here they shipped minerals from the Mountain Pass Mine. The building was made from sheet metal and its floor was made of wooden boards. When you are inside you can see through the boards, to the ground several feet beneath you. The building looks something like a barn. Two little boys used to play in the space beneath this loading dock; by 2002, the thing was abandoned.)

All the little boys are signs.

Yes, thought Clara, this is their blessing and their curse.

The pigeons have their nests in the rafters, and I think there are eggs even.  

Is that so? Charles said, leaning in and touching lightly the crown of Clara’s head with the top of his wool hat.

*

Mountain Pass was discovered in 1949 by two men searching for uranium. Instead of uranium, they found minerals for which uses were not yet known. It was ten years before the first color television, before the mine’s Europium made America red.

All of this was after Clara’s time. She had been on the silent screen. The picture was always grey.

*

I don't suppose two people ever looked death in the face more clearly than my mother and I the morning I was born. We were both given up, but somehow we struggled back to life.

*

Now the stagecoach is headed up a sandy trail, a shortcut. The valley behind them is glowing green. The inside of the mountain spilled as from a goblet onto the desert floor. Below the surface, the mycelium is starting to come loose.

Charlie had the horses running.

Charlie, the stars are really coming down! Clara cried.

Yes! He was almost shouting over the horses’ hooves and the Mojave.

I was thinking to meet—Clara’s voice trailed off.

Yes?

At the rotunda, she said quietly. Charles was unable to hear her, but he knew well what she meant.

Well, we won’t be long, he said at last. Don’t worry, we won’t be late.

Clara was silent and holding onto Charlie’s arm. Men and women were running everywhere through the valley.

We are more and more our own gravediggers! Clara shouted.

We shan’t be late! Charlie screamed.

The wind now was a blur. The horses fixed their eyes into the earth.

*

It was a miracle they made it to the mine. The horses are standing at the edge of an enormous hole, one thousand feet deep and five thousand from end to end. Clara and Charles sat in the stagecoach, Clara holding her stick in both hands. Charles leaned back into his seat, and let the reins hang loose.

It’s big, Clara finally said, and Charles agreed. Neither could have imagined such a hole. It was like waking up in the middle of the night and knowing you’ve been elsewhere.

We aren’t too late.

No, not too late.

At the bottom of the hole, a serpent was thrashing in its green water. Clara saw this and said nothing to Charles, who was leaning back in his seat, eyes closed, hands in his lap. And there, suddenly, just below the surface, there was the sign of the bird.

Moonsberry, Clara whispered, and she put both hands to her lips. She whispered again. Unfolding its wings, the light was as a wide spoon.

It moved carefully. Clara felt the bird slowly upon her, the curve of its chest folding into the place where her hips turned, making little rivulets. There was the sense of lilies falling, taking the place of the air and of voice. Clara could feel something already inside her open and enter again, as if for the first time. It was a way to dissolve; here there is no frontier and no horizon.

Charles now is asleep with his hat pulled over his eyes. Clara touched him gently on the arm. Charles. She whispered the way a little girl whispers at night to a golden retriever, and he woke up.

Oh-oh! He said. Okay, ready? Clara leaned back in her seat. Next time, madam, we’ll take the car.

Clara was at ease.

*

It may be that everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us.

*

Clara slept and Charles peered into the Ivanpah Valley. How some source had labored to install the mirrors. In the daytime, sun reflected onto the three towers from thousands of the things own faces. It was like a steam.

Beneath the moon, the men and women were dancing. Their hands went up as one.

Charles felt a pull on the back of his neck, and suddenly the three turbines roared to life. Somehow, without the sun, the towers burned. With every breath they struggled upwards towards the sky. This was the last of California. The wave would break. 

_______________________________________________________

1} Guillame Appolinaire (trans. Revell)

Ocean of Earth

                For G. de Chirico

                I built a house in the middle of the Ocean

                Its windows are the rivers that flow from my eyes

                Octopuses swarm over every wall

                Hear their triple hearts beating and their beaks pecking the panes

                                Humid house

                                Fiery house

                                Song season

                         Airplanes lay eggs

                         Look out for the dropping anchor

                Look out for the squirting ink

                You’d better climb down from the sky

                The honeysuckle of the sky creeps up

                Earthly octopuses throb

                And we are more and more our own gravediggers

                White octopuses of chalky waves o white-beaked octopuses

                There’s an ocean all around my house and you know it

                And you know it never rests

2}

[[Molycorp mineral loading dock at Nipton, CA. In 1984,
 a man bought this town, moved here with his wife and young son.]]

                            

3}

[[Senator William A. Clark arriving in Las Vegas. Union Pacific, 1905]]

The men and women who appear on the Ivanpah valley floor are the ancient Pueblo Indians and the modern Shoshone and Paiute.  

*

Believe not in what is coming.

*

In 1890, the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Jack Wilson—the woodcutter—received a vision. The vision was a dance to make the living and the dead as one. 

BEAR

The man Darwin has eaten, the man who carried the name of his friend—he also carried this:

∞

x

What is felt in this room is God’s mother. Two seagulls have come to the lake. In the cloud, there are an eagle and an ox.

You know they take turns feeding. I look up and all the coots are on the lake. Later, there will be geese. There will be ducks.

In the middle of the lake, the birds hold onto the algae with their feet; like this they are tied into the water and they stay still.

How do you know if the two of you are soul mates?

If it’s someone you can’t live without. For some people, there is no one.

Is this sad?

Yes and no.

What if there is someone that a person cannot live without and they never find them?

They die. Love has its way with them.

What if they do find them?

They need to shoot Love dead.

Or?

It has its way with them.

A CRYSTAL GOBLET

[[The planet mercury sings like a crystal goblet. 
It sings all the time.]]

Stella is on her way to the rancheros where Elando is in a house with a large back yard and a swimming pool. He is a butler for the Bigelow Space Mansions. A man he has been friends with all his life has a living space inside the garage. This man lights up the night.

Stella parks in the driveway. The garage door is open and Wade is grilling hamburger patties on a round barbeque. Along one side of the garage there is a granite countertop. There is a head of cooked cauliflower inside a Tupperware and on a paper plate there is a slab of ham. The ham is from the honey-baked ham store. Wade can have a ham any time he likes.  

Stella!

I’ve brought a cake!

Nice honey, that’s nice. Thank you.

Stella sets the cake on the counter next to the ham and the raw meat patties. Elando is slicing the spiral ham into rounds an eighth of an inch thick. Some of the fat he pulls from the edges and tosses into the sink.

When the burgers are finished and half the ham is sliced, everyone serves themselves and goes to sit down in Wade’s room; it’s built out of the garage and has air conditioning. In the room there are two couches and a television set. There are statues of Buddha and masks. There are mirrors and feathers and a painting of an eye on a string.

So how is it at the Mansions? Stella is saying this but the words come more from the paint on the walls and the furniture than from inside her.

Elando puts a bite of hamburger in his mouth and gestures in the air with his fork and knife: People come and gamble and they are very, very weird. Every day, their meals cost fifty thousand dollars. He swallows his hamburger. They eat sharkfin soup, they eat something called “Buddha jumping over the wall.” It’s some type of weird chicken that they put in herbs, and one pot is two thousand dollars. They eat bird nest. They get one pot of bird nest: three thousand dollars. They eat shark fin soup, birds’ nest soup, Buddha chicken, everything changes. Fifty thousand.

Wade is cutting his ham with fork and knife. Stella is eating with her fingers.

A woman and a man arrived yesterday, so the Mansions have to take the plane and go to China to pick them up. And last year they were there in December and they were there previous to December like in about October and the guy was losing money, so when the guy loses money he stays, when he wins he leaves, because he believes that, when he’s losing, he wants to try to get it back—more—so when he left, he had like about 20 million dollars that he lost that time, and he got it all back, like on the last day. But, what was funny, is that previous to that, he was starting to leave. So for about six nights they had to get all this food ready for him to take to the plane, the same food that they prepare during his stay, for the plane, for him to take; and then they cancel all the food for five days, so the food had to be refreshed, and they still charge the money. So guess who ate the food? We did.

So, so the birds’ nest is like this little ball that is this big () In Malaysia they have some caves, in some cliffs over the ocean, and the saliva of the bird is the nest, and that is supposed to be extremely good for the skin, it’s like a delicacy, and these birds are pretty expensive because they have to cultivate these birds. Isn’t that weird? I eat it all the time. It’s like a bunch of little fibers. The stuff itself doesn’t taste like anything but they prepare it with a kind of syrup, so it’s kind of sweet, so it’s okay. Or, they like the coconut, the whole coconut, they open it up, and they put the bird in there with the coconut milk, and you eat it out of a coconut. It’s really neat.

And they eat caviar, they order like five thousand dollars worth of caviar.

Stella and Wade are eating and both are nodding, glancing between Elando and their plates and one another.

You never had caviar? It’s like a bunch of little round eggs, from the ocean, and the eggs, they have different grades of caviar, they have Beluga, Deluga, Osetra, but the way that they do it is with the condiments. They toast bread—they call it toast point—and you put a little bit of sour cream and egg white and all that stuff, and that’s how they eat it. You taste it but if you eat it by itself it is very fishy.

[[Wade’s piece of tooth is falling out and he frowns. Elando leans over him.]]

Wade has no teeth now! What do you think?

You can’t tell. I am glad they are out; those teeth needed to go.

I told him to get them all out. This is what he got. I said, get ‘em all!

What dentist is it?

At the University. Six hundred dollars for ten teeth. Sixty bucks a tooth.

It’s cheap…

It’s a lot.

The root is the problem.

The amount of money they charge for every little procedure. You can’t think about it forever. You need to get happy. Life’s too fucking short. If you watch the news and only the news, I don’t think I have ever seen a person who is unaffected the way Elando is, if you watch only the news the way he does, I know people that do that, and it makes them dead. I don’t think I have seen it take an effect on him.

I’m not dead! I eat the birds’ nest and the eggs from fish! We have Stella’s cake! Let’s have the cake!

Elando, did you see my parents?

In room four.

What did they do today?

They ate the soup. They don’t have distance and they don’t have time, so everything is like a song.  

Let me tell you: you dance with the devil, you will dance with the devil again.

No matter what.

[[and with the planets ringing, as they are]]

Cake is tasty, Stella!

Do you like it?

Let me tell you, honey—

It’s so moist!

Don’t get rid of anything.

[[[Meanwhile, in room four of the Bigelow Space Mansions]]]

Apparitions:

*A friend of Stella’s father, Jeremy

*Stella’s father, Rip

*Stella’s mother

Jeremy: We’ve got a switchboard hanging here, probably take that back and give it back to them.

Rip: It’s a converter. I’m saving that for historic purposes. That’s our first fiber-optic demo. It’s got fiber-optic transceivers on it. It takes the electrical signals in, converts it to fiber-optic, on that little card, and it comes out the other side. See, here are a couple transceivers with a routing wheel. It’s our first demonstration unit that we made.

Huh.

The fact that you can put electricity in, convert it to fiber, get fiber out.

What is the fiber?

It’s a little piece of glass, a glass fiber.

I didn’t realize, the electricity converts to glass?

It converts to light.

Is the fiber actually glass?

Yes, glass.

But the electricity is light.

Can you see this? This is a fiber-optic cable, so there’s a little piece of glass in there, a little long strip of glass, made by Corning.

Ok.

This is an LC connector. That’s a ceramic barrel, with a little 50 micron glass in it, the width of a human hair, and the glass is extruded into miles and miles…

It’s amazing!

So the light becomes glass?

It’s a transceiver. It transceives between light here and electricity there. This is a standard RJ 45 cable. The light—

So the light does become glass?

The light goes through the glass. We’ve got light and electricity. Electricity goes through copper. Light goes through glass. The glass guides the light, the wavelength.

What happens when you have a curve?

It goes right around---neeuuuu [[he gestures with one finger]].

So the light goes around?

Yes.

With the glass.

The sharpest bend ratio you can have is about a third of an inch, a third of an inch, you can have a third of an inch arc. So it goes around that. There’s fibers that go all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

There are?

That’s how America talks to Europe. They can talk on a fiber link or a satellite link. So if there is no delay, that’s over a fiber-link. If there’s a half a second or second delay, in what they’re saying or they hear an echo, like you see on the news when they’re waiting for their person to get it for a couple seconds, that’s a satellite link. It has to go up for a second and down for a second. The fiber-optics is instantaneous because the speed of light is so fast.

Wow, it’s going at the speed of light!

It is light.

It is light!

So there’s a fiber-optic cable here, and this is the other transceiver.

Can we make anything else go the speed of light?

Only light goes the speed of light.

But here the electricity can go the speed of light. Can you convert anything else to light? [[shakes his head]] Are you working on it?

They use electricity now. It would be better if everything was light.

This should be in a museum or something; you could maybe give it to a science museum.

They wouldn’t know what it is! Everything we’ve learned is in the optics. This transceiver to the other transceiver. That’s the real work of this. Now, see how each of these have two fiber-optic cables coming into them? Now we do it with just one. One cable, one fiber, and we have a bi-directional thing on there, it’s like a prism. It separates the light into two wavelengths. You get two colors of light. One color goes left, one color goes right. So that way we can go out on one wavelength and back on the other wavelength, on the same fiber, at the same time. They don’t interfere with each other because they’re different frequencies, different colors. You can do it with any wavelength of light, all the colors of the spectrum. There’s visible light and an invisible light, so infrared, where any color—

Stella’s Mother: Are you ready guys?

Ready!

It’s so nice that it’s not hot.

It’s a breath of fresh air!

Where did you walk to this morning?

Jeremy: I walked around the lake!

Did you see them coming to get the goose? The goose was sitting and it was hurt.

No!

Maybe they had gotten it by the time you got there. I think the goose, it had a hook in its leg, and it was really in pain, and it couldn’t do anything.

What did they do with it?

Well, I called Animal Control because it was right in the pathway, but I never did see them come.

You don’t think they just killed it do you?

Well, you know, I feel this way: if they do just kill it, it’s better for the animal, than for the animal to go around with a big fishing hook in its leg.

Rip: Well, they could just get the hook out.

Yea, I think that they could do that, but whether they did…

Jeremy: They aren’t just going to kill a goose.

Rip: What I think is they’ll disable it somehow, and just get it out.

[[[They sit down at a table.]]]

Look at this salad—China Coast: grilled and chilled chicken breast, Mandarin oranges, oh that sounds good!

Grilled and chilled chicken breast.

Are you going to get a salad or what are you going to get?

The last time I was here I had them keep the chicken hot, remember? And that was great.

Keep the chicken hot!

The China Coast, that sounds good. I’m going to get the China Coast, chicken salad.

I will have the Mahi-mahi. And how about a caviar? 

Only if it's Beluga.

Can I have the air on a string? Can I have the speed of light?

Everything inside already is. We’re faster even.

[[A hologram projection is on the far wall.]]

Look at that wave.

Do you think that’s Hawaii?

It must be.

He must have something on the lens. There’s something…we can’t see through.

It’s the wavelength.

Jeremy: The prism’s not right!

Rip: I’m calling, I’m calling the receiver.

What’s he going to do?

They've got to get the lens cleared off!

Or it’s the fiber.

It’s not the fiber.

It’s the optics.

It’s not the optics! Something is on the lens. The prism is making a circle.

[[[The food arrives. Rip sets his headset on the table and all three begin to eat.]]]